Character sets

[simon@example.com (Simon Cozens)]

Oh boy, I should know this. So, I'm working on an
anything-to-Unicode-and-back convertor in Perl.[1]
Does anyone have a good web reference for how the
various Japanese character sets work? Ideally I
want something like "Shift JIS text starts with the
byte sequence 0xF0 0xBA and ends with the byte
sequence 0xBA 0xF0, and individual characters are 
encoded by ... "

[1] Yes, I know about iconv and everything else.
Shipping our own version is less hassle than either
of requiring iconv or shipping iconv along with perl.

-- 
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
		-- Aldous Huxley